UID Behind Schedule, But Cash Isn’t Why

The Nandan Nilekani-led program to issue a 12-digit unique ID number to all Indians is running well behind its own ambitious targets, but a lack of funding or government backing doesn’t appear to be the reason, contrary to a media report in The Sunday Guardian.

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The Nandan Nilekani-led program to issue a unique ID number to all Indians is running well behind its own ambitious targets.

Mr. Nilekani, the former chief executive of outsourcing darling Infosys, was hoping to issue 100 million unique numbers by March of this year. But several months later, the program still hasn’t hit that target. Thus far, about 80 million people have gone through the sign-up process successfully and 32 million unique numbers have actually been issued, according to a person close to the UID program.

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The media report said that Mr. Nilekani is upset the government isn’t allocating him more cash. The UID program requested about $745 million for its next phase of funding for 2012-2013, the article said, but the Planning Commission has recommended that the Finance Ministry approve less than half that amount, on the grounds that the UID project overlaps with another government scheme called the National Population Register.

Mr. Nilekani didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment, but the person close to the UID program said there’s no controversy over money – the project isn’t hitting any roadblocks due to lack of funds, the person said. UID was budgeted about $400 million in 2009-2010 and about $313 million for the current fiscal year ending in March 2012. It isn’t clear how much UID has requested for its next phase of funding. (The project’s phases don’t exactly line up with the annual budget cycle.)

That isn’t to say that gathering biometric data from 1.2 billion people – which involves scanning irises and taking 10 digital fingerprints in every city, town and hamlet – is proving straightforward. There have been technical growing pains, like ensuring that the data captured is good enough to be entered into the national UID database. Scaling up the sign-up process has been a significant challenge, the person close to the program said.

Still, there are some positive signs of progress lately. In July, 7.8 million people were enrolled; that accelerated to 12.9 million in August, or about 416,000 people per day. The challenge is to pick up the pace slightly and then sustain it for a long time. To reach the project’s next big target of signing up 600 million people by the end of 2014 Mr. Nilekani’s team will need to enroll closer to a half million people every day, on average.

Mr. Nilekani’s foray into government is worth watching closely. The theory behind his appointment was that after building an agile, efficient private sector enterprise like Infosys he could create a similar culture in a government body and confound the public’s expectation that New Delhi is doomed to mess up big projects. He needs plenty of cooperation from other government entities to pull off the UID rollout, of course. If Mr. Nilekani is meeting any resistance from other agencies or ministries, he isn’t talking about it publicly.

The government has taken some steps to make the UID number relevant, by allowing it to be accepted as a proof of identity to open bank accounts and to get a mobile phone. But the next challenge is to verify – or in tech lingo to “authenticate” – that a person is who they say they are. These institutions will have to install tools, probably fingerprint readers in many cases, that can do a quick look-up of a person in the national UID database and get a binary answer: yes, this is Amol Sharma, or no, this guy is a fraud.

Meanwhile, the UID has managed to move forward without the imprimatur of a legislative act of Parliament. Activists who oppose the program as a government overreach or an infringement on privacy (largely because of all the personal questions asked in the sign-up process) say this is disturbing. But Mr. Nilekani’s team has taken the view that it has every right to exist under executive order – its current status – and legislation is simply a way to strengthen some aspects of its authority and clarify issues like privacy. A UID bill is now before a standing committee in Parliament.

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